Arthur Brookes, 1926-2007

Peter Grundy, UK

Arthur Brookes and Peter Grundy were colleagues in the College of Venerable Bede and the College of St Hild and St Bede from 1974 - 1979 and in the Department of Linguistics at University of Durham from 1979 until Arthur's retirement in 1991. They edited Individualization and Autonomy in Language Learning (Modern English Publications, 1988) and co-authored Designer Writing (Pilgrims, 1988), Writing for Study Purposes (CUP, 1990) and Beginning to Write (CUP, 1998).

"If I were Arthur standing here today, I would probably ask you to turn to the person next to you and tell them one thing about him that you would like them to know." These were the words with which Arthur's son, Chris, began his tribute at Arthur's funeral in Durham Cathedral on 3 January.

If I were talking through possible activities for his funeral with Arthur, I can imagine our conversation going something like this:
ARTHUR: How about, 'Turn to the person next to you and tell them one thing about Arthur that you'd like them to know'?
PETER: Yeah, but what we say about someone today we might not say tomorrow. Is this a problem?
ARTHUR: I don't think so. If you allow enough time for each pair to talk, then probably the first thing each person says is just a prompt that leads to a more considered evaluation.
PETER: OK. Right. So let's imagine your funeral's over and HLT-mag ask for a tribute. Should I begin by telling the reader one thing about you that you'd like them to know?
ARTHUR: Do you think they might think the one thing you tell them about me is more important than it really is?
PETER: Umm.
ARTHUR: You could tell a story.

Once upon a time, there was a young ne'er-do-well who'd decided to give up teaching in order to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was autumn, and this young wastrel had joined the colony of starving writers who go to Cornwall to wear out keyboards and live off blackberries at the time of year when holiday cottages can be rented for peanuts. By the beginning of December, our 'writer' had discovered that the novel he'd completed was an embarrassment even to himself and had realised that winning the Nobel Prize might be more difficult than he'd expected.

At about the same time, a forty-seven-year-old acting Head of Department had placed an advertisement for a Lecturer in Drama in The Times Educational Supplement. And now he was wondering what to do. He was wondering what to do because a Lecturer in English had just handed in his notice with effect from the end of the month and with Christmas coming it was already too late to advertise for a replacement in time for the start of the new term in January.

Having just completed a work of doubtful fiction, our 'writer' had little difficulty inventing a letter of application for a Lectureship in Drama, despite being less qualified for this post even than for the Nobel Prize to which he aspired.

And having taught in five different countries and in institutions as different as a secondary modern school in the Gorbals and a university in New Zealand, the acting Head of Department had equally little difficulty identifying as woefully inadequate the application for a Drama post that was lying on his desk. But, given the situation and the desperate need for a Lecturer in English...

When I met Arthur Brookes on 13 December 1973, I was expecting to be interviewed for a post as a Lecturer in Drama, and was nervous. I'm sure Arthur sensed this and knew why. He'd seen from my CV that I'd produced The Tempest as a school play. It was his favourite play, he said. So why had I chosen it? Actually, the Headmaster had chosen it because it was a boys school and there was only one female part in the play. Arthur's "Oh" and slight grimace indicated that this wasn't the perfect answer. In for a penny, in for a pound, I explained that I'd given Ferdinand instructions to show affection to Miranda in such a way as to make it likely that this would be the last year in which the school play had an all male cast. A mischievous twinkle appeared in Arthur's eye, and this time the face he pulled was more smile than grimace. I realised that my interviewer was temperamentally inclined to the side of the underdog. He asked me to tell him about the production. I explained that Prospero had problems learning his lines, and problems acting too. Again the sense that Arthur was making a judgement: why then had he been given the leading role? And what did this miscalculation say about the interviewee? I explained that because of these problems, three weeks before the production I'd decided to put Prospero in a wheelchair. And that his authority had been immeasurably heightened by being pushed around the stage by Ariel and by being deferred to as a handicapped person. Even his lines had suddenly become easy to learn. And no one had applauded longer and louder on the first night than the man in the audience who came in a wheelchair and who'd been parked in the front row, face-to-face with Prospero. "Now that is BRILLIANT, just BRILLIANT!" says Arthur. Suddenly, we're directing the play together - the conversation, and my confidence, flow. Does the handicap symbolize Prospero's loss of his dukedom perhaps? Or has he developed his 'art', his 'rough magic', to compensate for the loss of physical strength? Arthur has transcended the interview mode. But then, Arthur was a man who didn't need to hide his feelings or to engage in the pointless role-play of a traditional interview.

Arthur was above all else a team teacher. His idea of team teaching wasn't that two or more teachers took turns at teaching a class. For him, team teaching meant two or more teachers working together in the classroom. And the less predicable the class turned out to be, the more he liked it. On one occasion, he was due to give a ten-minute lecturette. As he talked, I wrote down every word that followed an 'um', 'er' or other hesitation marker. And a very interesting list it was when I read it out to the students at the end of the talk. Did he mind? Of course not - because he was a man who believed in the importance of truths, of whatever variety and however seen, and a man who would have absolutely hated to have been team teaching with a colleague who compromised one jot. Of course, you can't work in a team like this unless you trust each other completely. I think I got to be almost as good at it as Arthur in the end, but I certainly began young, nervous, lacking in confidence, and a long way behind him. Arthur wasn't only a team teacher, he was a team planner as well. So I also had to learn from him not to be a control freak or to be too absolute when it came to the syllabus, the reading list and the way lessons are planned.

You may be someone who knows Arthur only through the books on teaching writing that we worked on together. As he was in teaching, so he was in writing. A team writer. Working as a writing team took not half as long, as one might expect, but twice as long. But of course the results were twice as good. In the eighteen years we taught as a team and the few years more when we wrote together, I can't recall a single occasion on which we ever quarrelled about anything, ever exchanged an angry word, or ever parted on even the slightest of bad terms. This doesn't mean that we didn't come at what we did from different positions or that we failed to critique each other's contributions. But you could work with Arthur as you would work with yourself - although of course this second self had a fresh set of ideas that you’d never have thought of alone.

Humanistic teachers are sometimes accused of privileging attention to affect over attention to the cognitive dimension of the subject. This is a false dichotomy as all non-partisan members of the profession know, because one can't essentialize feeling and reason in such an over-simple way. Arthur was deeply involved with the cognitive content of his subject, whether literature or linguistics or direct language teaching. But he approached it with an empathy for learners - when he used the word 'you' in the classroom in expressions like 'you might think..' or 'now, you see..', it was unmistakably an invitation to the students to decide for themselves whether or not to think or see in the way indicated; when he said, 'Now, you see, I think..', he wasn't instructing but offering a view, so that what anyone learned in Arthur's classes they truly learned for themselves and were absolutely never taught. And at the level of lesson planning and syllabus design, he always talked about 'the students', and never about 'students'.

One criticism of humanism from the earliest days is that it values personal experience above understanding the natural world. It looks inwards rather than outwards. And in the domain of faith, humanism is associated with the belief that man is his own master and that there is no supernatural being. Arthur wasn't this sort of humanist. He had an unshakeable Christian faith and an absolute belief in the afterlife. Since he believed that everyone has an equal right to their own opinion, he would never think less of anyone who didn't share his faith. But being a person obliged to bear truthful witness on occasions when it mattered, he didn't fail to remind me of what he knew and what I didn't in the last words we exchanged, on 13 December 2007, thirty-four years to the day after I first met him as a young ne'er-do-well:
PETER: I'll pop back and see you in the New Year
ARTHUR: Or in another country.

In this short and unrepresentative collection of disorderly thoughts, I've said nothing about Arthur's remarkable teaching career or about his achievement in preparing a large number of non-white South African teachers for their roles in post-apartheid South Africa, the country of his birth. I outlined this career to one of his publishers at the IATEFL Conference at Exeter in April. Her response: "It's humbling, isn't it." If you're interested in knowing more about this side of Arthur's life, send an email to peteriatefl@btinternet.com and I'll send you the short tribute describing his career which was recently published in the Newsletter of one of the Durham Colleges.

Oh yes, one thing about Arthur that we'd both like you to know: he'd have written something quite different from what you've just read. I hope you've just smiled. He's probably reading this over your shoulder and will be fascinated to observe your reaction.